SMS Masterminds, publicly traded as SpendSmart Networks, Inc. (OTC: SSPC), is an emerging company focusing on digital loyalty and text message marketing. With over five million subscribers in its marketing database and thousands of retail customers, the company needed to proactively monitor a variety of systems. Since signing up for Splunk Light as a cloud service, Masterminds has seen benefits including:

SMS Masterminds, publicly traded as SpendSmart Networks, Inc. (OTC: SSPC), is an emerging company focusing on digital loyalty and text message marketing. With over five million subscribers in its marketing database and thousands of retail customers, the company needed to proactively monitor a variety of systems. Since signing up for Splunk Light as a cloud service, Masterminds has seen benefits including:

Enhanced protection from potential brute force attacks

Reduced operational costs

Faster resolution for errors that could impact revenue﻿

To find out more about how SMS Masterminds enhances security, and improves system functionality using Splunk Light in the cloud read this.

Aside from being a clumsily executed pun, the title does sound a bit ominous – especially if you are familiar with the 1976 Eagles classic (is it just me or is it getting old in here?). Well it should be ominous because checking into the cloud is like checking into a hotel and that is both good and bad.

The good is you’re getting out of your daily grind, turning over all the maintenance to someone else, and getting away from the screaming kids (or hardware alarms for the purposes of our analogy). That’s great!

The bad, however, is you are moving in with strangers, the maintenance people have the keys to your room and you pay by the night (or minute or megabyte) and there can be financial “surprises” like when you “accidentally” take something from the minibar ($6 chips, $10 trail mix, a $15 “intimacy kit”? Continue reading this blog here...﻿

Splunk Enterprise customers can now drive down the cost of big data analytics by reducing the storage costs of historical data by 40 percent to 80 percent whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Read more...

Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD) is a private four-year college of art and design that offers undergraduate degrees in Animation, Design + Digital Media, Drawing + Painting, Game Art and Illustration, and graduate degrees in Art of Game Design, Drawing and Painting. With a distributed IT infrastructure across five separate locations that serve over 500 students, LCAD wanted to gain centralized visibility into its servers and network. Since deploying Splunk Light, LCAD has seen benefits including:

Headcount savings equivalent to hiring a full-time employee (FTE)

Reduced log checking times by 75 percent

Reduced bandwidth costs by 20 percent﻿﻿

To find out more about how LCAD increases IT efficiency, reduces bandwidth costs and maintains federal compliance read this.

Technological democratization (say that 3 times fast – that’s one), the power of technology to allow the budget-constrained rest-of us to do things only well funded professionals could do before, is everywhere. And, if you give me a few minutes of your time, I’ll tell you how it’s even coming to the smallest of IT organizations.

So what got me thinking about technological democratization (that’s two) was that famous opening scene in Saving Private Ryan in which Stephen Spielberg showed an incredibly realistic re-enactment of D-Day and the Allied landing on Omaha Beach. Back in 1998 BD (“before Disney”) that scene cost $12 million to film (or 18% of the cost of the entire movie) and involved over 1,500 extras and tons of highly paid professionals at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). The work was so specialized that they actually had one person whose job title (printed on their business card and everything) was “manager – underwater ballistic effects.” No, seriously, I met her.

Now flash forward 10 years to 2008 (still BD for ILM but not so much for Pixar) in which that scene is re-enacted by 3 graphic designers using only 2 military uniforms, 2 fake rifles, some rope, a (really BIG) camera and 1 station wagon. Total time to produce this knock-off masterpiece? 4 days. Although the budget was never shared, just looking at the station wagon (and, let’s face it, the graphic designers) makes it clear that it was WAY below $12 million.

t was a crazy idea to begin with, having a webinar for overworked IT professionals and having that webinar in the middle of that busy workday. Well, much to our surprise, a ton of people showed up! But, because of the nature of your jobs, a bunch of you couldn’t. DUH! What were we thinking? But the response was so positive that we wanted to give you other overworked souls a chance to learn how to make your lives a little better (at a price you can afford). So here are the highlights you can read while running from one IT fire to another,or during the only breaks you really get during the day. I think you know what I mean… (continue reading)﻿

For the past two weeks, I have tried to log into my Splunk account and not been able to. It tells me "Password link is invalid or has expired. Please generate another." It allows me to enter my Username or E-mail address and click on Email New Password. When I do, I get an email with a link that takes me right back to this page.

I have tried contacting support, but they have just sent me the same email and link I have been receiving.

I believe the problem is I created the Splunk account in late 2014 and never used it. I would like to try to use it now.

I am still trying to login. I am not sure if my username is set for "markmcginnis" as it was originally or "mmcginnis". In either case, none of my standard passwords work, including the one I set up for Splunk.

You’ve got a small IT team trying to address many problems across IT ops, web site system administration, and application development. The solution to that is a better way to manage and analyze all of your system logs. The issue is that many of the industry-leading tools are pricey and budgets are tight and only getting tighter. You’re not alone. Spiceworks’ market research in their State of IT Report for 2016 shows this to be the trend.

What if you could centralize all of your logs and then search, analyze, report, monitor and alert on them in real time and do it all for a price starting at $3 a day*? That’s pricing for either an on-prem or cloud solution. Would you be interested?

If so, we’ve got an online event that should be on your New Year’s resolution list. On January 12th 2016, join Splunk for the live webinar–“IT Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”. You won’t want to miss the real-time data collection demo when we will “shake-off” between iPhone and Android smart phone users. You’ll see the results posted in real time using Splunk’s new HTTP Event Collector. Also, we will show you how you can manage all of your logs and solve those pesky IT problems for each of your most critical IT use cases. And do it all for less than a cup of coffee.

Join now for updates. Creating your account only takes a few minutes.

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You see servers and devices, apps and logs, traffic and clouds. We see data—everywhere. Splunk® offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure. What can you do with Splunk? Just ask.